(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 563: Week Without Driving

This week Talking Headways is being hosted by our friend Anna Zivarts who guides a panel of elected officials and advocates to talk about the impacts of the Week Without Driving. They look back at 2025’s activities and look forward to this year’s version.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in the hosting archive.

Featured guests include:

Arizona State Senator Analise Ortiz (Referenced Videos on TikTok and Instagram)

Rochester MN City Council Member Nick Miller

Alice Hilton and Quinn Mulholland Living Streets Lexington

Kai Hall of Greater Greater Washington

Ruth Rosas of Nondrivers Alliance

Listen to Anna speak previously on Episodes 366 & 488

For a full unedited AI generated transcript see below:

Jeff Wood: Joining us today, we have guest host Anna Zivarts. Anna is a visually impaired parent, the lead organizer with the Non Driver’s Alliance, an author of When Driving Isn’t An Option, steering Away From Car Dependency. That’s episode 4 88. For those of you who want to go back into the Talking Headways archives and listen in 2021, launched an experiment.

How can we bring attention to the ways disabled community members who couldn’t drive or couldn’t afford to drive navigated their communities? So Anna invited people who could drive, specifically elected leaders and people who worked for the agencies responsible for our streets, sidewalks, and buses to experience what it was like to get around without driving for a week.

Fast forward five years and the week without driving has grown from a few dozen participants in Washington state. To a challenge with over 600 hosting organizations in all 50 states. In today’s podcast, Anna host a conversation between some of the advocates and elected officials who led a week without driving activities in their communities in 2025.

Listen in.

I’m just gonna read everyone’s bios and then we’ll dive right into the discussion. So first up joining us is Senator Analise Ortiz. Who proudly serves the people of West Phoenix and South Glendale, representing Arizona’s 24th legislative district, she is a born and raised Arizonan, a former investigative journalist and a daughter of educators, Ortiz champions policies to lower rent, come back, corporate, greed, and defend the civil rights of all people.

Next up we have Nick Miller, who was elected in 2024 to Rochester Minnesota’s city Council, where he represents Ward two, a district that covers downtown Mayo Clinic’s Hospital campus, and mixed use neighborhoods to the West. In his first year on council, he has moved forward a study of gaps in Rochester’s Trail Network.

Initiated a council resolution to support restoration of regional passenger rail service in Rochester, and helped. Shape a new policy for the Destination Medical Center Initiative designed for wellbeing. From Lexington, we have Alice Hilton, who cares deeply about streets as a shared public spaces, a founding member of Living Streets Lexington, a new advocacy and community building organization dedicated to co-creating safe, vibrant, and welcoming streets.

Alice enjoys walking, being outside, and riding her bike, especially alongside other people. Also from Lexington. Quinn Mulholland is a safe streets advocate and member of Living Streets Lexington. He has experienced in grassroots advocacy campaigns having previously served as a community organizer for a local nonprofit, in addition to advocating for better transit, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure.

In his personal capacity. He has also works on transportation safety issues as an urban planner for the city of Lexington. With us from Washington DC we have, Kai Hall is Greater, greater Washington DC’s policy manager and the coordinator of the DC Transportation Equity Network raising the outskirts of Tokyo.

Kai is an advocate for transit rider, dignity, and believes people of all ages should be able to get where they need to go safely and conveniently. And last but not least, we have Ruth Rosas who tells stories in English and Spanish about how people move and what freedom of movement means as an advocate for mobility.

Justice Ruth brings over a decade of experience in transportation, public health, youth development, and environmental justice. They believe in reclaiming streets as spaces for connection, care, and liberation. Thanks everyone for joining us. So my first question for you all, and we can go in the order of the intros, if that’s all right, is how did you first get connected to week without driving?

What inspired you to get involved? Senator Ortiz, do you wanna kick us off? Of

Or can’t drive. And many of my constituents on the west side of Phoenix do rely on public transit to get to work. We also have some of the deadliest intersections for pedestrians in the entire county right here in my district. And it’s really important if we’re going to change these things, we need to understand fully where the gaps are.

So that’s why I took on the challenge and I’m really grateful that I did.

A lot of times. I am normally getting around on an e cargo bike, but it was exciting to be able to bring people together, understand the perspectives of who is not served by our transportation network and who on a regular basis is invisible as far as planning. If you’re not able to regularly get around by a car, by your own, or having someone.

Who can give you access. So I’ve gotten more involved every year, and this was the first year I was an elected official and got to participate in the campaign and bring other colleagues on the council and also make it official for our city to participate for the first time.

How did you all get connected?

A lot of our priorities around advocating for policies that reconnect communities that prioritize pedestrians and transit riders and non-drivers in general. So it was a natural fit for us to get plugged in and it’s been incredible to work with Ruth and you, Ana, and it’s connected us to so many more of our local elected leaders and other officials who work on transportation.

Started in Washington state with the Disability Mobility Initiative to really understand how people who cannot drive experience their community and get. People who are in decision making roles and generally the public to understand that because many people are not aware of what those experiences are like.

In 2023, I was with America Walks and we were connected with Anna and we decided to work together to take this nationally. And so a lot of the work that I did there was how do we expand something that started in one area one state to something that was bigger. And we started doing this mostly by our connections and our network at America Walks and expand from there.

So now it is across all 50 states and we’re also internationally in Canada and Australia, and we’ve been contacted by people in many different parts of the world to understand what this is like. So it’s been really exciting to see it expand.

How has this been a tool to move your advocacy forward as an organization? How has that worked for you all?

So after the first two years of us organizing the Week Without Driving campaign we’d reach out to elected officials, whether they’re council members, advisory neighborhood commissioners, or the mayor, and so many of them would say no. Because it would take too long for them to rely on public transit to get to the destinations they need to go to.

And for us this is like one of the main things we’re trying to highlight is even in a place with relatively abundant transportation options, like DC I think we have a number two metro in the country. It is still too difficult to get. To certain parts of the city to get across town to the point where the people in charge of our systems won’t even use them.

And so we. Wanted to give this kind of core frustration, some language that was easily accessible to both members of the public and to decision makers. And that’s how we landed on the transportation time tax, as saying that this is one of the core inequities in our system. It’s how are we prioritizing different people’s time based on the mode that they use.

And so in DC it is still. Trips taken by transit, take on average about two and a half times longer than trips taken by driving, which to us is still unacceptable. So it gives us something to work towards. So that’s one of the main things. The second thing is it raises awareness about a key constituency in DC about.

36% of residents do not own a car. The last time this was counted in 2019, so it’s probably higher now. And yet a majority of our most abundant public spaces are streets are public streets are dedicated to the movement and storage of cars, and so we see that as a huge imbalance. Contributing towards a high transportation time tax.

So it’s given us an ability to highlight this constituency, this non-driving constituency as a group that elected officials should be listening to as well.

Of those, yeah. Those trips that you took into work seemed pretty epic as far as how long they took. What was your experience sharing your week without driving journeys on social media and how did you constituents react? What did you learn? What was that experience like?

I think anyone from other cities who’ve been here recognize that as probably the first thing that’s different about this area is that it is. Very hard to get around without a car. I decided to document this journey because I thought it was very important for people who always drive to find alternative ways to get around the Phoenix Valley, but also to shine a light on the injustice, right?

It really is an injustice when we think about how far people have to travel without a car and how long it takes compared to. Someone who does have the luxury of a car, it took me what is usually a 20 minute drive into downtown Phoenix from the largely Latino neighborhood of Maryvale. It took me two hours on public transit, which typically is a 20 minute drive.

That was because of delays and as I was documenting this and putting it on social media. My comment section was just flooded with people saying The delays are the worst part. The QR codes don’t work, just talking about their different experiences. And then I met people on the way as well who told me what they had gone through.

I met a man who has a visual impairment. He works security late at night and the buses don’t run past a certain hour, so he has to spend a lot of money on Uber and Lyft. To make it home when he has those late night shifts, and that is just not right. When we talk about transportation tax, that’s something that would be included on a transportation time tax is the money you’re spending on things like Uber or Lyft as well.

So it was very eye-opening and I was grateful that people on social media. We’re asking, how can we take action? What can we do to change this? And that’s really what I think this whole campaign should be about is mobilizing people to action.

I really appreciated how much you shared the stories of your constituents who were riding those buses. ’cause this is the daily life experience for many people in all of our communities. And I think that’s so important for elected leaders and the rest of us to connect with. But people aren’t already out there waiting for the.

So I wanna talk about what does it take to make that difference, right? To begin to change our communities, to have non-car driving options work better for all of us. And Alice and Quinn, I wanted to hear a little bit about your experience with Week Without Driving as a coalition building tool for the work you’re trying to do in Lexington.

Do you wanna speak to that? How it’s served as a way to bring people together who wouldn’t normally see that they have a common interest?

That was before I was a part of the group. And organizing that campaign led to the formation of Living Streets, Lexington as an organization. So it really was the reason that we came to exist and having that as a way to build a coalition of other organizations and like we got a lot of really good news coverage and had partnered with a lot of local nonprofits and the library and the senior center and other advocacy organizations.

So it was a really effective way of building out this broad-based coalition like you mentioned. And I would also say I’ve been really inspired by the work that y’all have done, Anna and Ruth, around really like centering this in not just about like people who usually drive going a week and trying out, not driving, but really actually like.

Changing who is at the decision making table. And that was one of the, I think, really powerful things about the challenge in Lexington was that a lot of city council members participated and we got a lot of really great feedback from them about like how eye-opening it was to rely on the bus system to go about their day-to-day lives.

’cause a lot of them don’t often ride the bus.

I actually had the mayor and our city council president take me up on it. I saw our council president at several public events that week showing up on his bike and the mayor at least once with a walk to school day that we did in partnership with our public school system. But I think it’s been the conversations that I’ve taken after week without driving with other elected officials who didn’t participate that have been most eye-opening.

For example, with the walk to school day, it happens at one of our schools along the southeast side of town, which is adjacent to a county road, which is designed much like an urban highway. Through that neighborhood, the roadway separates a mobile home park from the school that’s their neighborhood school.

And when I was walking along the side of the mobile home park. No one joined me. All of the kids that were participating in Walk to School Day had been bused over to a public park and were walking along the path, but nobody from the neighborhood on my side was joining just organically. And so as I’ve talked with my colleagues at Olmsted County, I’ve told them that many roads in our city are county jurisdiction or state jurisdiction.

Our county does not have an adopted Complete Streets policy, and I’ve been able to educate them on what that would do and how it’s a safety and a pro human development measure that they often talk about their services as not so much infrastructure, but provision of human services and tying the human health element into infrastructure has been a productive conversation.

We’re not there yet, but we’re in the process of adopting a safety action plan funded by Safe Streets and Roads for all. And that’s one of the key recommendations that I continue to ask that comes out is the recommendation for Complete Streets policy in the jurisdictions within our MPO service area.

We’re about a third of the US population and higher percentages in low income communities, right? Some rural communities as well as urban communities, and we often are not considered as essential community members who need to go places. And I think one place that we see that is when we’re thinking about planning for how people get to medical care, how people get to school, right?

How people get to work. But I wanna ask specifically, Nick, in the context of Rochester, around your work. With access to medical care. ’cause I think that’s something that when planners are thinking about how people are gonna be able to get to those doctor’s appointments, they’re not considering that.

Not everyone can drive themselves there. Do you wanna speak to the work you’re doing around healthcare access?

And I think as Mayo Clinic has access points in rural areas as well, those tend to be primary care and not specialty services. My wife is actually an eye physician and treats patients for a variety of conditions, including those that are causing visual decline and require regular treatment, and her clinic is only accessible in Rochester, so she has patients who are forced to either find a family member or pay for transportation, or many times drive themselves.

Unsafe to access their medical care. And this is a conversation she has with many of her patients who have very limited vision and she will ask them to start the conversation, not have you considered not driving, but when did you stop driving? And often the response is I drove today. And it’s a difficult conversation to then explain that they don’t meet the requirements to drive.

And will lose access. Also, just tell the story about many people in our community choose to move to Rochester to be closer to their medical care. I have many aging neighbors and just last week, one of my neighbors accidentally pressed their gas instead of the brake as they were accessing their driveway, and they hit a mature tree in the front of our yard and I was called to come back home and he was taken away by ambulance.

It’s fortunately going to recover, but it’s just a constant reminder of how poorly our transportation system serves the needs of people who live in our communities.

Does anyone else have an example of that?

That is thanks in large part to good land use decisions and also relatively abundant access to transit. But there are still gaps in DC’s relatively unique compared to the rest of the country in that we do have good options, but there are still gaps, whether it’s in the sidewalk network, like we’ve had folks highlight how sometimes the sidewalk will just stop.

And then it’s a road. Or more often than not, it’s the fact that many of our sidewalks are not a DA compliant, and so if you are using some sort of mobility device, you may not be able to access the street or the curb safely. There’s also folks who highlighted the lack of bus shelters and how in my area, especially like the densest part of dc, we also have the highest rates of the urban heat island effect, but.

We don’t have as many shelters as the wealthier temperature wise, coolest part of dc. And so we had folks highlight some of those disparities as they went about their day. Things that you might not notice unless it really affects you but everyone benefits from accessible sidewalks, accessible bus stops having a place to rest while you wait for the bus.

A sheltered place to wait for the bus.

And we were meeting a hotel house cleaner out at her home somewhere in the outskirts of DC and rode the bus together with candidate Bowser and then transferred to the metro. Still back in the day where you had to pay twice, there wasn’t a free transfer. And I remember this housekeeper was talking about what a financial penalty that was for her and how difficult it was to have to pay that extra bit because she couldn’t afford to live in a more central area in the city.

Where she could ride the metro without taking a bus first. And that conversation with Candidate Bowser really made me reflect and when it came to thinking about how do we highlight these stories of non-drivers, that’s really where the idea started. So thanks DC for helping us with that. I think that housing piece is something that we think about a lot.

Around like who has access, right? Those of us who can’t drive or can’t afford to drive, many of us would love to live in areas with great transit near the places where we work or go to school often. That’s where housing is a premium. And so we’re forced further out into areas with less sidewalks, less connectivity, less transit options.

Is that something that happens in the Phoenix area? Senator Ortiz?

We’re actually shot down by voters and you’ll see that the arguments against the light rail extending are almost always rooted in racism and classism. And we actually are still having to fight to extend the light rail into my neighborhood here in Maryvale. We’re having a council meeting on it in a couple of days, and so it’s very frustrating and when we think about.

Where housing is built, we absolutely need to be building denser along public transit corridors. The two things go hand in hand and we continue to see pushback on the development of affordable housing or dense housing, near transit corridors for the few transit systems that we do have, like our light rail.

So we really do need to do a better job, I think, as a movement of. Explaining how these two issues are inextricably linked and how we all deserve a place to live that we can afford while also being able to get to work or our friend’s house or church or the hospital, or whatever it might be, through the method of transportation that is best for us and for our families.

And yeah, I feel like the bus system often gets left out of conversations, or at least the conversations that we were all kind of privy to. And I feel like we, without driving really. Helped us bridge that gap and start building a relationship with leaders in our transit agency and with bus riders and, ’cause I guess Lex Tran Lexington is like any other city where the bus system works really well for some people.

If you’re a University of Kentucky student, then it’s great and you can rely on it and it’s dependable and fast and frequent. Then obviously for other folks who also rely on it, it doesn’t work as well. And so I think it was just a really good container to try and talk about all of these different pieces at once and in relation to each other.

And because we did the Week Without Driving campaign in 2024, we built some really solid relationships with transit agency leadership, and now we’re able to use that to get an American Public Transit Association grant to do a transit advocacy academy. Are really trying to work to build up a cohort of Lian residents who I think to Senator Ortiz’s point are thinking about the relationship between housing and growth and transit.

And it’s a pilot project and we’re packing a lot into four sessions, but we’re gonna see where it goes.

And I think a lot of times. There is a lot of importance to getting people to see the limitations of transit and how hard it can be to rely on it. But also I think there’s something to be said for uplifting that transit is an amazing resource and can be a really great and wonderful and social experience.

And it’s truly like a melting pot of all different types of people and just celebrating the bus as something that is not only essential, but also can be a fun experience for people was also important.

I know that we don’t always hear about everything that happens. We try to follow things with the hashtag on social media. That’s week without driving, and ask for folks to report those to us. But there’s always new things that we’re learning about because it is a very diffuse and grassroots movement. Ruth, do you wanna share a few of your favorite activities?

Has that ever occurred that you’d like to highlight?

Also, round tables. One of the big things about week without Driving is that we are obviously very passionate about making sure that people with disabilities are included in these different activities that people do, and. People with disabilities are often excluded because people don’t know how to include them or don’t know the accessibility needs.

And so people have done round table discussions and making sure that elected officials hear from their constituents. People have done meetups or after work gatherings. One of the really cool things that people did this year was build bus benches, which was amazing because they got to do really interesting and creative paint.

Around them and it was amazing to see that people were able to use this bus bench as a way to highlight that many places don’t actually have the things that people need, which is shelter and a place to actually wait for the bus. As we heard throughout this conversation. Many times people are not actually waiting the time that maybe your abcess, you’re waiting a lot longer, or maybe there’s ghost buses, and so we really need to make sure that those people have accommodations because there’s a lot of people with disabilities who don’t have that access.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think it’s just amazing to see what people have done. A lot of the amazing things that I have seen is the bus ride-alongs because they try to get their mayors or elected officials to go with them, and many elected officials have never done that before. And so it’s a way to incentivize people to see that their mayor or their elected official, their city council member is actually also trying to understand their lived reality.

And so a lot of these really amazing activities are incentivizing storytelling. One of the big things that we have seen is uplifting the stories of involuntary non-drivers, the stories that we don’t normally hear, whether it be people that are low income or people with disabilities, or. Even children included.

I talk about this a lot because this is a big thing that in my personal life is really important. We often see people not including children in these stories, and I talk about how I had to walk to school. It was over a mile and I had to walk with my little sister. And I was very young and so was my sister and I live in northern Illinois.

And it used to snow a lot and it was very cold. And I think that often we exclude children from these conversations. And so highlighting those. Personal stories are really important. We’ve seen young people be included in these conversations, which sometimes is the first time that we hear about this, especially in certain communities, in rural communities.

And so I think that the storytelling aspect of this is really important. And so what has come out of week without driving is that we’re shifting the narrative around non-drivers, and we’re shifting the narrative about. Who is being talked about. And the amazing thing is that there’s a lot of content and so I definitely urge and encourage people, if you wanna see how weak without driving has happened in your community or your state, look it up because there’s probably something that’s been highlighted.

And so please do so on Instagram or TikTok. And we’re hoping to do that a lot more in the upcoming year so that people can see all these stories that are being told.

So October 1st through eighth is what we’re leaning towards for 2026 as our official week without driving. Dates. We’ll be doing national organizing support starting in February with our national kickoff, and invite anybody who’s interested, both in the US or anywhere in the world really to join those webinars and learn more.

I wanna hear a little bit about what you all are thinking as organizers and your communities as elected officials. What would your hopes be for next year, for week, without driving? Is there anything you’d like to try? Anyone you’d like to try to invite to participate? Any sort of fun activities you’d like to try to organize?

Maybe jumping on the bus or the light rail from restaurant to restaurant, get different snacks, try different food, and then have a conversation at the end about the policies that we can change to together.

We’ve seen transit Bingo cards. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. And it hasn’t happened for a week without driving yet. I’ve been trying to get an agency to help me do this, but a a wheels on the bus ride along where you’re singing and storytelling for kids, riding the bus and ultimately going through a bus wash.

That’s the goal. Haven’t got it to happen yet for a week without driving, but. My Lexington friends. Any ideas that you’re thinking about or, I know we’re still early in the planning for 2026, but anything you’d like to aspire to for next year?

And I think one of the interesting things about 2026 is that it is an election year and there will be candidates out making the case for why they should be representing different parts of our city. I am encouraged that those are new audience members, both for participating in week without driving, feeling a special pressure perhaps to understand how our communities and our city services are working and go out and try those and publicize their experience as candidates and also perhaps.

Add some additional weight to the invitation to my colleagues on the council today who have not participated yet. So I think 2076 is a huge opportunity to grow. Who is participating and who is talking about the week without driving?

I’m too busy to do this. I can’t, I don’t have time to ride the bus. Or I couldn’t possibly take transit. Or walk or bike to this thing that I need to do as a candidate. And I think it, it really does raise some important issues of how does anyone who doesn’t have access to driving potentially ever run for office then, or serve as an elected official if we’re acquiring them to basically be able to drive or afford a driver.

And I think while it is challenging to try to do week without driving. While you’re campaigning in most parts of this country, I do think it’s an important thing to consider because if we have these requirements around, or expectations around what it means to be an elected official that require a driver’s license that’s really limiting to a lot of folks.

So

I think we should be actively trying to earn the votes of everyone in our community and understanding their needs and making sure that representation at the local policy making level is addressing those daily needs. And I think public transit is a huge need, or at least transportation more generally.

We would not be able to do our daily lives without good access to transportation.

Super encouraging next year, election year. I think it’s a huge opportunity to educate candidates, especially in dc The mayor has a huge role to play in how transportation projects are built or not built. And hearing your story on of how Week Without Driving came to be with then candidate Muriel Bowser and now you know, her three terms in and seeing how she’s evolved.

I’m hoping we can get her on the bus with us to talk about these issues. I’m hoping we’ll get candidates on the bus. Ultimately, like going back to Ruth’s point. This is about narrative change and so I think for us, we’re really trying to use the transportation time tax as one way to tell a story about what is one of the core issues with our system, even though we have a pretty good system relative to most other places.

Time, how we value people’s time and all the infrastructure choices we make to affect that. It all matters. And building out partnerships. The time tax concept came about with partnership with DC Transportation Equity Network members, and I really look forward to continuing to work with our residents to build this out.

We launched a new webpage that we called our accountability tracker. Basically, it showed all of our list of elected and appointed officials who have some sort of role to play in our transportation systems, and we showed their pictures and we showed who we invited. We had that all in one tab. Then they were all in gray scale, and as they committed to the campaign, we shifted them over to what we call the champions tab, where their picture would be in full color.

And so we would keep pushing this saying these are champions. It was somewhat of a shaming tool, which I think is effective, especially for elected officials who stubbornly say no. If we can show them that there are. This is like relatively minor, but if there are consequences to saying no, choosing not to opt in to highlight the experiences of this big constituency, I don’t know how else you’ll get movement.

So we were really excited to launch that new tool and honestly, the, one of the biggest things that made a difference was to Senator Ortiz and Council Member Miller’s experiences having. Existing public officials take initiative without even the advocates needing to ask. That makes such a difference.

And honestly, like that was a huge part of our success this year. The CEO of WADA was already on it. We had various agency heads here, reach out. They’re like, when are you gonna do it? So that was a huge part of it.

I feel like that opens up a whole opportunity to work with some of our emerging bike buses and talk about the school pick up and drop offline, and how awful that it’s for everyone involved. And then also we’ve had some conversations with high schoolers who are interested in learning how to ride the bus.

I’m excited. I did not know those were the dates, so I’m thrilled. Quinn, I don’t know if you’d add anything to that.

So yeah, I’m really excited.

We’re lucky in Washington State that we do have fair free transit for everyone under 18. So makes it a little easier to get some folks access who wouldn’t otherwise have it. Is there anyone else who wants to share any experiences, thoughts, takeaways around week without driving before we wrap this up?

It’s been really empowering and so I am just really grateful to you, Anna and Ruth, for organizing this.

And right now, unfortunately, too many of our transportation systems are set up just to be able to do that in a car. But that’s a choice and it’s. It’s not a choice that has to be the way that it is forever in the future if we start to organize alternatives. So thank you all for joining. If you are interested in learning more about Week Without Driving, it’s week without driving, dot org is the website.

We welcome you again to join our monthly webinars to start to organize with us as we prepare for the 2026 week without driving events in October.